According to Finance Digest, 95% of customer interactions will be powered by artificial intelligence by 2025.

What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing is marketing that engages customers through dialogue that puts the focus on interactions with the customers through two-way communications in real-time conversations. Conversational marketing includes engaging website visitors, converting them into leads or being a vehicle for existing customers to continue engaging with a company.

Why is conversational marketing important?

By taking a conversational marketing approach, brands don’t need to stop their more traditional methods of lead capture into a marketing funnel or remove many of the other one-way communication styles. It is another tool used to engage an audience based on their preference or communication styles with a brand. By offering customers multiple channels to engage, it also lets them choose how to communicate with a company. Conversational marketing is increasing in popularity due to its improved results of moving visitors through a funnel in a more streamlined fashion with increased conversion rates.

Benefits of conversational marketing :

For marketing teams adopting conversational marketing tactics, there are a significant amount of advantages and reasons to allocate resources and tools toward this effective route, including the following:

Humanize the customer experience.

 Conversational marketing gives sales and customer experience teams the ability to deliver a more human touch with prospects. This begins the relationship on a positive foot, especially when the conversation is more personalized for the user.

Increase engagement.

One-to-one communications with a brand give consumers the feeling that they have direct access to the lifeline that they need. This may lead to an increase in engagement from prospects who may not have previously identified themselves as someone who may need information or support.

Provide a boost to the sales funnel.

When conversational marketing is a deployed tactic, businesses are able to quickly identify quality leads as they come in and share information that is crucial to the selling process. Through a conversation, this could lead to an increase in conversions and a shortened sales cycle.

Quickly recommend products or services.

Through inputs or comments from consumers, live agents and chatbots can be used to direct consumers quickly to recommended products or services that may be aligned with their needs. With data about past purchase history, chatbots can also pop up to make recommendations for other products based on customers who may be a part of a similar persona profile group.

Maintain customer relationships.

Being able to rapidly respond to customer support issues or provide information on other products and services provides a positive feeling for those customers. With customer retention and revenue growth over time, conversational marketing will not only maintain a positive customer relationship but can also grow one as well.

Respond in real time.

Especially with customer support issues, submitting a support ticket and waiting to hear back can be a cumbersome and frustrating experience for teams. Being able to respond in real time reduces the resolution of an issue, but also could lead to more sales from new prospects, as they work through their customer decision-making process.

Collect important visitor data easily in the engagement process.

When dealing with static lead capture mechanisms — such as forms — marketers can collect data from prospects, but often not without hesitation from the end user. Forms are commonplace and many users are hesitant to give information up about themselves. With conversational marketing, data point collection can be built into the interactive experience. The data points collected will be shared organically through the conversation and collected in a marketing automation or CRM tool.

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